Letting your mistakes lead you to new ideas
“Design Opportunities” often guide my work. “Design opportunity” is a technical term when your mistakes, accidents, or material flaws appear unexpectedly to threaten or derail a project. I learned how to maximize my use of accidental occurrences from my teacher Ken Hunnibell. When things went wrong, he always had two questions:
The first question was, “where’s your drawing?”….because if we had done our planning right, the answer should be in the drawing. If our planning had not been so good or we had not taken the time to do a drawing.
His second question would be, “do you think you can save it?”
This is where Hunnibell would shine because he would take the time to consider all the ‘Design Opportunities” for how our mistakes might lead us to a place we had never considered.
Ken would always illustrate learning experiences by telling stories about some mistake in thinking or the odd way he had learned something new.
Ken introduced me to “Design Opportunities” while building a drafting table; nowadays, you call it a stand-up desk. My desk project was an example of a project where the necessary details were not reflected in the drawing. I would do a 3D CAD model these days, but back then, 2D hand-drawn drawings would be the document of choice. My drawing table had a sizeable removable top that could be tilted with a mechanism and removed via quick-release hinges. It was a large table, so it had to disassemble to allow easy transport. My drawing had captured the table, but the mechanics were TBD (to bed decided). I was an easy mark for Hunnibell’s witty and ironic questions about how I plan my work.
Instead of forcing his values upon us, I remember him saying this during our first class. “I do a lot of half-assed things, but when in need to do something “right,” I like knowing how. All we had to do was look at Ken’s work, and we immediately could see the benefits of ‘knowing how.”